Nature runs its course at abandoned Stamford country club

Photos from the abandoned Twin Lakes Swim & Tennis Club on W. Haviland Rd. in Stamford, Conn. on Monday, June 25, 2018.

Photos from the abandoned Twin Lakes Swim & Tennis Club on W. Haviland Rd. in Stamford, Conn. on Monday, June 25, 2018.

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Photos from the abandoned Twin Lakes Swim & Tennis Club on W. Haviland Rd. in Stamford, Conn. on Monday, June 25, 2018.

Photos from the abandoned Twin Lakes Swim & Tennis Club on W. Haviland Rd. in Stamford, Conn. on Monday, June 25, 2018.

Nature runs its course at abandoned Stamford country club

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STAMFORD — If humans disappeared tomorrow, how quickly would nature reclaim the habitats we have made for ourselves?

For someone interested in these kinds of abstractions, a visit to the abandoned Twin Lakes Swim and Tennis Club is edifying. In the mere decade since the club locked its gate on West Haviland Lane for the last time, the ravages of time and the environment have asserted themselves rapidly and decisively.

In the parking lot, dragonflies flit among clumps of wildflowers growing through cracks in the asphalt. Further on, where the swimming pool used to be, broken piles of rebar-laced concrete and stacks of wooden debris rise from thickets of thigh-high grass. Here and there, an overturned deck chair or a rusty old grill evoke the site’s leisurely past. Someone has spray-painted “RIP Twin Lakes” across the roof of a vine-covered outbuilding.

After 2008, when the member-owned club declared bankruptcy, the club was foreclosed and auctioned off, its 14 acres delivered back to the whims of nature. But for former Twin Lakes members, fond memories linger.

“It was a great place to raise my kids,” said Kate Lombardo, a longtime member who also served as the club’s president in its final years. “I don’t think they took their swimsuits off from June until September.”

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“I miss it. Every day I miss it, as soon as this season hits,” Lombardo said.

For Lombardo, a Brooklyn native, pool season at the club contrasted agreeably with the urban summers of her youth.

“Coming from the inner city of New York, where all we had were Johnny pumps,”— fire hydrants, in Brooklynese — “this was a really cool thing,” she told the Advocate.

After Twin Lakes ceased operations, its land was consigned to the limbo of foreclosure auctions, where it changed hands repeatedly. The current owners, Massachusetts investment firm General Portfolio Properties, acquired the site in 2012 as part of a bundle of foreclosed properties. It was then subdivided into five residential plots, and is currently on the market, according to Thomas Vozzella, the Berkshire Hathaway agent representing the owners of the land.

General Portfolio Properties would be willing to partner with a developer to build something new on the land, Vozzella added. However, according to president Richard Gleicher, the company has no plans to undertake the development on its own.

“We’ve done market studies, and the cost to develop the land further exceeds what we can reasonably expect to sell the houses for,” Gleicher said. At least for now, it seems nature will continue to run its course at Twin Lakes.

For her part, Lombardo looks forward to a time when people can again enjoy the land.

“It was a beautiful club, and it was a God-awful shame that it went under,” Lombardo said. But “the property is full of happiness and full of glee, and it will one day be somebody else’s place where they can have wonderful memories.”